In the Claws of the Eagle by Aubrey Flegg

working on some particularly beautiful piece he could reduce them both to tears, and Louise would wonder what would happen if he felt like this in a performance. After awhile, however, she realised that these emotional moments belonged in rehearsal. At his performances it would be for other people to weep. She found it more and more difficult to draw a line between herself and him. They were partners in his music now, merging into a single resonance.

CHAPTER 6
Mutual Understanding
    Erich was hungry. He was always hungry, and he had been drawing food. That amoeboid blob in his drawing book was a huge Wiener schnitzel, and those things like marbles were potatoes, drawn small so he could have lots of them. His tummy gurgled; perhaps drawing food had not been a good idea. He listened. For some time he had been hearing an interesting scraping and scratching sound which seemed to be coming down through the high dormer window that was set into the sloping ceiling of his attic room. Mother had lifted him up once or twice so that he could see out, and he had felt like a bird looking down on the little patch of lawn at the back of the house. At present all he could see was sky.
    He looked around for something to climb up on so that he could see out. The only thing to hand was an old nursing chair with a high ladder back. Abandoning his schnitzel and potatoes , he set-to to drag the chair to a place under the window, and climbed up on the seat. Now he could get his hands on the sill; it was tantalising, another few centimetres and he would be able to see out. He felt the chair-back against his knee. If he could just … Groping with his foot, he found the first rung on the back of the chair. He rose cautiously and looked out.
    The lumpy green of the Vienna Woods rose beyond the end of the garden. He could see the vine trellis on the far wall of the garden, but the lawn, from where the scraping sound wascoming, was obscured by the slope of the roof. He felt for the next rung on the chair and pulled himself up. Now he could see! There was Grandpa Veit’s head.
    ‘Granp–’ he began, raising a hand to wave, but at that moment the chair shot from under him and Erich found himself suspended with his arms over the windowsill, his legs thrashing in the vacant air below. Instinct told him that dropping back into the room onto the top of the fallen chair was not a good idea. Another instinct, more obscure, prevented him calling out to his grandfather for help. If he could just make it onto the windowsill he’d be all right.
    He tried to push himself up on to his hands but his arms were not strong enough. If only he could use his legs. He lifted a knee but it got caught under the sill. His strength was running out now, but grim determination was making him hold on. He used his head to work out a move, and in one last effort he managed to swing one leg up and hook his heel over the top of the sill. Now, like a rider mounting a horse, he rolled tummy-wise onto the windowsill. In fact his effort was so successful that he only just stopping himself from continuing his roll on out of the window, down the roof, and into the garden where Grandpa Veit was looking up at him with interest.

    What Veit was doing was digging up Sabine’s lawn in the hope of planting some late potatoes in time for an autumn crop. He was stripped to the waist. He had lost so much weight that his lederhosen swung loose about him from their leather braces. The war was over, and since November the year before, soldiers had been returning home hungry and weary from trenches and billets and barracks on a dozen different fronts. Real starvation threatened all but the wealthy in the capital.
    He only had a small patch of lawn still to dig. All morning ashe turned the grass, sod by sod, Veit had designated these as the countries lost to Austria as a result of the war. He had dug up Poland first … let them have their Republic, if the Russians didn’t get them first. Then